Need to kill a HD Partition

Factual Questions
1

I have a laptop HD that my dad partitioned with Japan’s version of XP. I can’t remove the partition from the disk to get the recovery CD to work (english XP’s fdisk doesn’t work!)

I thought it would be simple to find a partition “killer” but the only one I got (something called partition zapper) was a demo and doesn’t do anything unless I paid first (what the hell is the point of that? I’m thinking it’s a scam).

So I turn to you, fellow dopers. Anyone heard of a program (for free) that can do this job? Tucows has several partition utilities but most simply move or resize or recover partitions. I need this one deleted.

Thanks!

2

Do a Google search for delpart.exe a DOS utility from the Windows NT 3.1 Resource kit.

You can find the details here.

If you want to wipe an entire hard drive, try the freeware version of KillDisk.

3

I keep an old set of Linux Slackware boot disks handy for just these types of things. An older version fits onto only 2 disks (boot and root) and once you boot from there you can run the linux version of fdisk, which can kill of darn near anything in the partition table. The hardest part is remembering to write the new partition table out before exiting.